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I was given a walkthough of Intuit’s QuickBooks 2009 recently. Pretty cool piece of software — if you’re into numbers and bean counting and all.

Actually, it’s a powerful product and effective tool for any small business. It tracks business and accounts and receivables. It generates invoices and reconciles online banking and keeps a keen perspective on a business’s fiscal health.

I work from home. Alone. No bean counter (except for me), and no bookkeeper (except for me). So I am the CFO at CHO.com. I’ve used Quicken for years. It’s a simple cash in / cash out product. I file an assignment for a client, type in the amount, and Quicken keeps a running tally of my billings. I’ve created Memorized reports for Weekly Billings, Current Receivables and other minutea that I like to track. I invoice for an assignment, I type the date in the Ref column. When it pays, I overtype that with the date of payment, and click in the Clr box to show it’s been reconciled. When clients were very late with their payment, I’ll type the original date of invoice in the Memo field, beside the assignment name.

Sort of keeps my finger on the pulse of my Very Small Business.

Angela Cheung, a product manager with QuickBooks, says that’s the goal with QuickBooks: To help people Get Productive, Get Insights, Get Customers and Go Global.

It seems my way is the way many home officers run their books. Some use paper ledgers. Some, like me, are a step removed from a chisel and stone tablet, but what works works, no?

Some use simple products like Intuit’s SimpleStart product. This download is free if you have no more than 20 customers. It’s almost ideal for me, for example. But like many freelancers, I can have customers come and go, some as one-offs that I’ll never see again. As such, I can easily scale to double that figure in a year, hence pushing me into a paid version of the application (Simple Start Plus @ $99.95).

You see, that’s the way the people at Quicken handle their products. It’s not about the number of employees at a company. It’s about the number of customers, or vendors, or inventory SKUs. Quicken does things this way because their top priority is to listen to customers, Cheung says. They watch small biz at work, track their issues and pain points. They listen in forums and focus groups, trying to keep tabs on the small business pulse. What they’ve learned is “small business owners don’t start a business because they love accounting,” Cheung says.

In the coming age of The Cloud, where almost everything related to computing — software applications, data, information, essentially everything but the computer itself — will be hosted and password protected on the Web, Intuit has its Small Business Connected Strategy. It’s a hybrid online and software model. The company also has QuickBooks Online, a completely hosted model.

The company’s stats seem to bear that need out: Some 75% of small businesses bank or handle credit cards online. A streamlined wizard helps sync QuickBooks 2009 with online bank accounts, creating a sort of one-stop shop online banking center for the small biz. Like most other accounting apps, fields are familiar. Check writing looks like a check (even for online bill pay). Input fields get downloaded from the bank to QuickBooks. The product generally leverages common features. “It’s about reducing the time and effort on manual data entry,” she says.

Home officers can use the product alone. Home officers and bigger companies can have multiple users (though not with Simple Start). One person can be backing up files or creating reports while another is reviewing accounts. There’s an inter-office instant messsage component. Stumped by a function? The onscreen Live Community sidebar offers relevant content from QuickBooks’ 2.6 million users and accounting experts to the rescue. It even pushes up content or commentary relevant to what you’re doing at the moment — even if you haven’t sought answers.

If you work globally, a built-in currency converter will convert the world’s currencies to something you can understand, like dollars. It can accept international payments, send and receive wire transfers or drafts ($15 and up per), and generally turn your biz into a multinational enterprise, from a F&A perspective, at least. “This lowers the barrier for people to start transacting internationally,” Cheung says.

Don’t have a Website? Every copy of QuickBooks 2009 includes a free Website (though your address will be intuitwebsites.com/’insertbusinessnamehere’. Not exactly a branded Web experience, but a Website nonetheless. It’s free for 12 months, and costs $4.99 thereafter. Want your own site? Using Intuit.com Services, a five-spot for set up and $2 a month thereafter will get you your own domain.

I’m stil underwhelmed at the need for all this firepower for a one-person shop. But I know many solo businesses that transact globally and turn seven figures from an erstwhile bedroom. Maybe they could use something like QuickBooks 2009.

For me, I’ll stick with Quicken. It’s better than a chisel and stone tablet…

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2 responses to “Home Office Bookkeeping: Right-Sized vs. Overkill”

hi, this is ramesh from India. I have recently established an online bookkeeping firm. We are adept in using Quickbooks, Sage, MS Office Accounting. Besides we are accounting professionals. We charge $5.00 ph. Please let me know the best way to get clients. Thanks, Ramesh.V

Great post Jeff! I’ve warned about jumping on Quickbooks because the CPA/Accountant/Bookkeeper knows how to use it. It’s about keeping track of the money, not getting overwhelmed by the bells and whistles.

As a former ‘stone tablet’ bean counter, I’ve watched many small business owners come to a complete stop tracking the financial side of their business – it’s not their strength, QB’s is more complicated than they need or will ever use.